As you may have ascertained, I’ve not had much time to work on Willowgarden for quite some time. I have to admit I was disappointed in the lack of interest in the Developer Preview 2 release from a community perspective. Perhaps it was partially my fault, since I never got a chance to flesh out the end-user documentation to the degree I wanted, and many an open source project has been stymied through a lack of simple, clear documentation.

However, I’ve been really happy with DP2 as a platform for my own Web apps and sites, and so I really can’t complain about any of the work I’ve put into it. One such project is the Native American Flute Portal which just launched today — yay! With a few exceptions, the entire site was built on top of Willowgarden, and I’m extremely pleased with how well it’s worked out.

Another PHP project that’s shifted my attention away from Willowgarden is xajax, which of course is used by Willowgarden for the Ajax layer. xajax is in the process of a huge rewrite leading up to a 0.5 release, and I’m happy to say we’ve had some pretty neat action there due to the addition of a new developer (”CtC” aka Joseph Woolley). Much fun on that front is yet to come.

So, to wrap this post up, Willowgarden has met my personal expectations from a technology standpoint, but as a viable open source project, it just isn’t there. So I’m going to maintain a pretty low profile for a while and put off another big marketing/release push (aka 1.0 Beta 1 or something like that) for some time. I’ll be checking in tweaks and minor improvements here and there in the Subversion repository, but that’s about it. As always, I’ll keep you folks posted here at The Idea Basket!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Personal News, Willowgarden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.